But in your list of Chinese loan words that have made it into English, you forgot one of the most obvious: the word "tea" (like the product itself) comes from the Cantonese "ta" (meaning tea, as you might guess).

True indeed, but it probably came from the Hokkien (Fujian) word 'teh', instead of the Cantonese 'cha'. Much tea trade passed through Fujian and it was indeed there that the first tea leaves were smuggled out from.

I thought tea in Cantonese is Cha...reason also why we have Yam cha...(dim sum) in Hong Kong? As a matter of fact, the Indian word for tea is (Chai or Cha, depending on where you are) so very much a derivative from Chinese.

I stand corrected. The origin of the English word tea appears to come from the Fujianese word, not the Cantonese word.

By the way, the Mandarin word for "tea" is "cha," and I believe that this is the origin of the Russian word for tea ("chai"). And this makes sense since the initial Russian contacts with China were surely overland contacts through either Siberia or Central Asia, either of which would more likely have resulted in borrowing from Mandarin rather than Fujianese.

So it appears that the English word "tea" and the Russian word "chai" are etymologically related -- but not, as one might guess, through some distant proto-Indo-European root but rather through related dialects of Chinese.

Language growth and evolution takes longer than people expect, perhaps by comparison with the spread of technologies with serious budgets for promotion. That's why people are surprised that Esperanto has only a few million speakers in 125 years of existence, they compare it with the human life span, rather than with the life-span of something more appropriate, like an oak or redwood. Actually English grew about as fast in it's first 125 years, so we'll see if fairness and economics eventually help as much as imperial violence. I do hope so.

Today while there may be few Chinese words in English and vice-versa, mutual need for better quanxi may spur a new linguistic collaboration. Reaching across and because of the Internet, a new pidgin, and later, a creole, and even later, perhaps a new language, may develop, with English and Chinese as equal partners.

Considering that China wouldn't be under the British imperial rule ever: it doesn't appear to me that the Chinese people would embrace English the way most others(particularly Indians) did. When I'm chatting in Hindi, I type in Latin script and I observe that the Iranians and Arabs do the same. Guess, it's due to the alphabets and tonalities of the languages (though your mention of words adopted from Japanese contradict this thought).
Anyway, to sum up, consider the sort of long and close interaction it takes to come up with (loan?) words like: Bandanna, Blighty, Bungalow, Cheetah, Cot, Dacoit, Gymkhana, Juggernaut, Jungle, Loot, Punch, Shawl, Vivid... and then there of course are the obvious ones, Guru, Nirvana, Yoga, Roti, et al.

Japanese has the advantage that it isn't tonal. There really aren't any phonemes in Japanese which cannot be rendered simply and phonetically into English/Roman letters. The closest are a couple of cases where the same vowel is repeated (elongated to double it's basic length); English speakers rarely manage to get that one right without specific instruction.
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In the other direction, the only major problem that Japanese speakers have with English are 1) the letter/phoneme "L", and 2) the fact that we will use consonants which are not followed by a vowel (which Japanese does only with "n"). And since, unlike Chinese, they do have a phonetic alphabet in long-standing use in the same sentences as their characters, they do not have to consider what characters to use/invent for new words.
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That combination allows a lot of words to move back and forth with minimal violence to their pronunciation.

A semi-colony is, in Marxist theory, a country which is officially an independent and sovereign nation, but which is in reality very much dependent and dominated by another (imperialist) country (or, in some cases, several imperialist countries).http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-colony

It's an English-language publication and the article is about language. In that context it would be logical to infer that "we" is English speakers.
If we were blogging on Le Monde, it would be French speakers and on Yomiuri Shimbun, Japanese speakers.
Simple, really.

You seem to have missed the point. Why aren't Indians a part of the "we" of English speakers? English is different from all other languages (including French) in that it is the lingua franca of the world. Even in the case of French, who is considered as a French speaker? Only those who live in France or does it include French speaking people in places like Quebec and former French colonies?

It may be the lingua franca, but it's not the native language of India or most other countries. If Indians spontaneously added non-English words to English, it wouldn't expand the language as a whole. It would be interpreted as Indians speaking poor English.

Why aren't Indians a part of the "we" of English speakers?
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The comment was a bit sloppy in not saying in full "native speakers of English." While there are lots and lots of people in India who speak English, often quite well, they are native speakers of something else. (In contrast, people in Quebec are native speakers of French.)

I have a French (Belgian actually) speaking friend who visited Quebec (pour la premiere fois, I may add), via Boston, where I live and he was aghast at the language spoken in Quebec. Language being a living thing, the language in Quebec has moved on along its own course, I suspect.
But coming back to the Indian English...these days English programs are all over the Indian TV so I presume the new generation of Indians have the possibility to hear UK, US, or Aussie English and be understood by a native speaker when they speak in English. Having said that, as late as 2011, I have had difficulties understanding an Indian Friend, when I visited the country. Writing and speaking are two different worlds...Indians are well known to have produced excellent authors in the English language but they like all other non-native speakers, speak it with their native language accent/tonality. Speaking English as a native may exclude many indeed most of the population.

I recall from a linguistics course (and my memory may be faulty), that the French spoken in Québec has indeed changed less than in France - it is a bit of an archaic form of the French language.
Likewise with the English spoken in the South in the U.S.A.
The general principle, if I recall correctly, is that languages change more rapidly in urban centres and near the cultural capitals whence they originate.
The relevance of this to your comment: it is not the French language in Québec that has moved on along its own course so much as that in France.
One particular example: you can hear the difference between the future simple and the conditionnel in the French spoken in some areas of Québec. Not so in Parisien French.
But again, this all may be a case of mis-remembering.

I just speak languages and know nothing of linguistics but you know what? You most likely are right - that Quebec has retained the original and France has moved on. That is very typical of an emigrant community that is also noticed in music and other cultural remnants that it hangs on to.
On my side, I kind of had interpreted my friend's comment differently, based on my personal experience in Montreal and Quebec - that the language there have imbibed English which I thought had made my friend rueful. I remember this English influence in the older Italian diaspora in Canada who continue to speak their original dialect but had acquired new vocabulary and the mix indeed sounded amusing. I speak Italian which is how I had that strange encounter..but I digress. Thank you.

Yes, it tends to be a lingua franca and administrative/literary language, according to this link. And it is one of the official languages, right? Well, would that make its status like that of Chinese historically in East Asia? and like English in the Philippines today?

Indian English is the group of English dialects spoken primarily in the Indian subcontinent.[1] ... With the exception of the relatively small Anglo-Indian community and some families of full Indian ethnicity where English is the primary language spoken in the home, speakers of English in the Indian subcontinent learn it as a second language in school. ...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_English

The original point was more than valid. Good manners and common sense dictate that you don't say "he" or "she" when the person you are speaking about is in your presence, or part of your audience. Likewise, "English speakers" (readers = more correct) incorrectly implies "native English" -- which certainly does NOT define the entire reading audience. So it is unthinking, if not rude, to say "we", to the implied exclusion of all others.

> So perhaps China's rise is simply too new, and we just need another 20 years or so. We've seen a similar film before. Japan's sudden opening to the world, a world war, and then forty years of an economic boom put quite a few Japanese words and concepts into the Anglophone mind: kamikaze, futon, haiku, kabuki, origami, karaoke, tycoon, tsunami, jiu-jitsu, zen and honcho are all common English words that nowadays can be used without any reference to Japan. Add to that the more specifically Japanese phenomena well known to the English-speaking world: karate, judo, sumo, bonsai, manga, pachinko, samurai, shogun, noh and kimono, say, not to mention foods from the bland (tofu) to the potentially fatal (fugu). Of course, Japanese borrowed some of these words from Chinese, like zen (modern Mandarin chán) and tofu (dòufu). But English borrowed them from Japanese, not Chinese.

On some of them, yes, but I think you've got the timing wrong on a lot of these - they clearly entered English before. Let's take a look in Google N-gram, going from Commodore Perry to now:

A Pax Sinica? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Sinica Perhaps it depends on the geographical proximity and relative cultural strength of the actors. President Xi has just said that the Pacific Ocean is large enough for both the USA and China, so perhaps this is where the diffusion of concepts will occur or is occurring. And also perhaps in Central Asia, between the cultural poles of China, Russia, Iran and Turkey.

Johnson, make a note for next time. When talking about borrowing between languages, it would really help to get one of the audio recordings. Just so everybody has the idea of how similar, or how different, the phoneme systems are.
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Consider, for example, how else you would communicate to readers (listeners) the difference between two words in one of the click languages, which differ only in the particular click used. Likewise tones in a tonal language.
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Just a thought, as I say, for next time.

Why has nobody mentioned the yin and the yang, and chi (qi) et al, which have all found a welcome in popular culture, at least in this far corner of the English speaking world (New Zealand).
I can think of a number of potters' terms like kaolin that remain in use here too.

Certainly "yin" and "yang" and "chi" (new standardized "qi").
There indeed should be many potters' terms besides the word "china" (small "c") itself since porcelain found its way to the West (I don't have the year), influening much of fine English Bones and Native American works where the famous potter Maria used a clay and method (coil instead turn) heavily influenced by the method of ancient Chinese works.

Just a comment - "china" as in china has nothing to do in how Chinese pronounce "china" or "China" and more to do with Persians as far as I know. It got started with china and later became the name China. Interestingly Chinese name for China didn't make it not only to the west but also to the Russians who call it Kitay - apparently from Mongolian (logical given history though). On the other hand the name for tea was more popular- cha in chinese appears in similar form in many languages. Maybe people really know what is important - in the end Nationalism is only 200years old.

It's certainly a good question; usually, Chinese influence on English has consisted of calques or loan translations rather than words simply being borrowed directly, for example 'brainwash' is a calque on 洗腦 xǐ năo meaning 'wash brain', while 'to lose face', which is more reflective of Chinese culture, is 失面子 shī miàn zi or 'lose face'.

There are probably many words that have been borrowed between India and China, without being apparent today. For example, the word zen that you cited about has had a few changes along the way. Here's the relevant entry from etymonline.com:

The Chinese character for it is 禪. An earlier Johnson piece talked about Sanskrit. At the time I wrote that in translating Buddhist Scripture from Sanskrit, early Chinese Buddhist scholars used either existing Chinese characters or constructed new ones to represent the concepts as understood. 禪 is made up of two representational components. The component on the right means "one", "alone", "in solitude". The component on the left means "the "corporeal". Thus "alone in the corporeal" is the avenue to thought and meditation. This is the simplicity of the Chinese language. The character itself tells you its meaning already. Most times if you know the components, it is not even necessary to look it up in the dictionary which is organized around "components" (contrast that to alphabets)

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I agree if we keep digging, many words will surface in the nature of what once was "borrowed" but now no longer is readily traceable unless you know a whole lot about many many things.

I don't think it is all that hard, given the direct influence of Chinese culture including the use of the writing system in Japan and Korea. It doesn't take much digging at all with regard to Buddhism.

I have a question for you as you contribute prolifically and knowledgeable about Chinese.
That I know of, Chinese (and perhaps Japanese, Korean and other related languages) are the only ones that uses pictures(if you will) to describe an object or a thought, which is then stylized enormously. This is dramatically different, and I am no linguist, from most other languages that has an alphabet...essentially mimicking sound.
So my thought is that what you describe as the simplicity of the Chinese language is not so simple at all. Trying to understand a concept rendered into a picture, for even the native Chinese cannot be much fun let alone an uninitiated non-native. I would submit, this is why, to read a newspaper, a Chinese needs to know what, about 12000 ideograms, while that in most other languages...Indian and Arabic included, the number of worlds would be much smaller. Chinese is not so simple, to my mind, in practice but more so in its fundamental concept.

Roughly 600 Chinese characters are pictograms (象形 xiàng xíng, "form imitation") — stylised drawings of the objects they represent. (Wiki) Many other characters have a phonemic element, and/or are distinguished by an element (a radical) that helps indicate its meaning, so there are more clues than you might imagine. Many characters are combinations of 2 or 3 elements which you already know from having seen them in other characters. It takes a little while to have enough characters at your disposal to be able to read street signs but it is doable within a year.

Really? It just proves Socrates to be right...the only thing I know is I know nothing.
I thought Chinese is all "pictograms" - is that the word? I mean when I first learned about it, I was struck by how very different the language was, conceptually. Now if it has phonemes, then it would be like other languages -right? I do not know the "element" thing you are referring to - is it something mimicking sound or an idea, as in a pictogram or something in the middle. While on this, can you explain, how the New Chinese, as imposed by Mao Tse Tung (I still like the non pinyin version) is different from what used to be the tradition before him.

Character simplification basically reduced the number of (brush)strokes in the characters in the interests of literacy. Here is a comparison of Traditional and Simplified characters for the word, welcome (huan-ying). In this case they are both 'composite' characters made up of two elements.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Chinese_characters#Education

Usually we borrow a foreign word to our language because we could not find an equivalent word in our own language that could describe a 'thing' precisely and vividly. It got nothing to do with cultural superiority. English has been borrowing words from the natives of its ex-colonies. Is there an equivalent word, as vivid as amok (from Malay) in English?.

yes, a word like "rattan" springs to mind, where Europeans encountered something new to their culture.
As you say, many of the former colonies has added words to the English "gene pool", and this must have happened with all the colonial powers in history, I suppose:
Many local everyday words have been borrowed from the Māori language, including words for local flora, fauna, place names and the natural environment.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_English#M.C4.81ori_influence

I don't think this is surprising but what is surprising is the opposite - there are few English words or their variants in Chinese, as there are in Japanese for example. This is even more surprising given the popularity of English in China.

I've been in China since 2002 and I can't think of any other than brand names but even then, unless its an acronym, there's usually a Chinese equivalent.

One recent borrowing is the term 'yumcha' to mean a cheap knock-off copy.

The source is pretty obvious - the smorgordsbord-style Chinese restaurant; but it has changed meaning radically, and often means a cheap and cheerful copy that doesn't even pretend to be of high fidelity. (c.f. ePad, ePhone etc)

Still, they can often offer great quality/price ratio.

It may not be a word that has (yet) entered into the general vocabulary, but in my opinion it deserves to.

That's actually very uprising, since dim sum (点心）， just means snacks in Chinese. However did that become 叹早茶 in English？ But I guess meal are dealt in weird way in English, since supper somehow become dinner, the original dinner somehow become lunch...

The lack of Chinese words in English is indeed very odd. The influx of Chinese immigrants to the US didn't seem todo much. You'd have thought that the long history of Chinese working everywhere in the world would have had a greater effect.

But it also works the other way. "Remote control" is "yao kong qi" in Mandarin but "rimoto kontororu" in Japanese. Chinese has a few English loan words of course, but it doesn't seem as common.

The difference may come down to Language Policy. China has a whole team of linguists to develop approved neologisms, often through compounding, and incorporate them into the standard language. Otherwise it could be chaos with many variants for the same thing. As it is there are several possible translations for a word like microphone, and there may be regional differences in terminology between the PRC, Hong Kong and Taiwan, sometimes requiring parallel glossaries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_language